If there is one thing life keeps teaching me, it is that there are a whole lot of different kinds of people in the world, and most of them are very different than me. I learn this lesson many places (work, Church, even family), but there are few places in which this fact is as readily apparent as on my Facebook feed. But I figure that’s fine though, right? If everyone was like me, the world would be a lot less interesting. There would also be a lot less pictures of cats with captions, a lot less posts about how drunk someone got/hungover someone is, and a lot less updates about what people just ate. Now I am CERTAIN that there are a lot of things that I post on Facebook that many people could do without–Silly things my kids say, political crap, controversial whatnot, posting my blog, stories from the toilet, etc…. I’m far from perfect with my discernment about Facebook posts. I’ve been defriended by so many people that most of the folks who come up on the “People You May Know” part of my page used to be my FB friends at some point. But you know what? This is my blog and I can do what I want. I’ve come up with a list of some of the most annoying things that people do on Facebook–things that we can all agree have got to stop. So here they are:

Nope. Obama did not make out with Hugo Chavez. It’s called photoshop–Please look into it.

1) POSTING BULLSHIT
If you are posting something to Facebook, then you have access to the internet. Use it. Go ahead and do 30 seconds of research before passing something along that is completely (or even partially) false. Here’s a good rule of thumb: If the thing you are passing along seems even a little hard to believe, just do a quick Google search of it along with the word “Snopes.” For example, if you just watched a youtube video “proving” that Obama’s Birth Certificate is fake, type in “Obama’s Birth Certificate” + Snopes. Chances are you are not the first idiot to pass this along as fact. Posting a link to the Snopes article that debunks some rumor/urban myth/email forward a person just posted is one of my favorite things to do on Facebook. On the flipside of this, if you post something that you discover is bullshit, TAKE IT DOWN. And then apologize for passing along something false. I’ll tell you the same thing I tell my kids: “When you lie, you make it harder to trust you.”

2) POSTING PICTURES OF FOOD
So many of you do this. Now I get it–Sometimes food is beautiful. While I was in Vegas, my wife and I had a caprese salad that was so beautiful that it looked like a piece of art. It had these heirloom tomatos that were so colorful–It looked like a sunset. I wanted to paint my kitchen to match those colors. We took a picture of it and posted it for all to see…. But if this is something you are doing with any sort of regularity, you need to cut it out. No one cares.

If you feel compelled to let people know that your veggies came from Whole Foods, you MIGHT be annoying.

And along with this (and probably more importantly), please don’t brag about how organic your food is. I don’t care that you just drank a glass of milk, and I care even less that the milk came from cows who were only fed organic grass that was watered with unicorn tears and fertilized with the manure of free range chickens. I don’t care that they only milk the cows by hand, and that they only allow farmers with the softest skin to do the milking. I also don’t care that the farmers whisper encouraging things to the cows as they milk them–Things like “You are so beautiful” and “You’re a great friend” and “These are some amazing teats.” I. Don’t. CARE! None of us do. My wife makes me buy that same milk, and it costs six times as much. Get over yourself.

3) POSTING ANYTHING THAT TRIES TO GUILT ME INTO REPOSTING
If you post anything–AND I MEAN ANYTHING–that ends with the words “98% of you won’t repost this….” or something thereabouts, you can be sure of one thing: I have you hidden from my feed. Anything that tries to guilt you into reposting is lame–From Christianity to Cancer, it is all lame. Yes–We all hate cancer. Please don’t try to make me feel like if I don’t repost your status, cancer is going to win (or conversely, that if we all repost, it will have any sort of effect whatsoever on the fight against cancer). Cancer doesn’t read your Facebook posts.

4) POSTING ABOUT PROBLEMS WITH YOUR SIGNIFICANT OTHER
Get off the computer, call a friend, have a talk…. Do whatever, but don’t post something critical of your husband/wife/boyfriend/girlfriend on Facebook. Whether you are just wanting to vent or looking for validation, bitching about your significant other in any way is not what Facebook is for. It makes everyone cringe when people do this. Conversely, my wife has a theory that if you are one of those people who only ever posts about how awesome your spouse is, you are probably fighting non-stop. Either way, keep that crap to yourself.

5) POSTING ABOUT ANY SORT OF MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING
This should go without saying, but if you are using Facebook to try to recruit people to sell the same garbage you are selling, you are annoying huge swaths of your friends. We can see the dollar signs in your eyes and smell the insincerity in the post. Even if you really believe in the product (which you all do), Facebook is not the place. Peddle your wares the old-fashioned way: Lure us over to your house for a “party.”

Great…. You woke up early and went running. Thank you for letting us all know about it.

6) POSTING ABOUT HOW MUCH EXERCISE YOU’RE GETTING
Here you go: This is from all of us to all of you, for all of the times you’ve exercised in the past and for all of the times you will in the future…. “Good work. Well done. Good job going to the gym and lifting those weights and going for a run. You should be very proud.” Now please stop telling us about it. I realize that there are apps that automatically post how far you ran (That’s fine–Whatever), but if you are constantly posting about working out, you are every bit as annoying as the person at work who walks around groaning and rubbing their legs for the first half of the day in the hopes that you ask them why they are groaning and rubbing their legs. Then, when you don’t ask, they tell you that their legs are SO SORE over and over again until you ask them why–knowing full well that they are going to tell you about how hard they worked out…. Since you asked. Don’t be that person. And if you do happen to post a picture of yourself at the gym, please don’t flex or try to be sexy in any way. It’s annoying.

Which brings me to my biggest Facebook annoyance….

No–I will not comment on your picture about how good you look. Please stop taking pictures of yourself.

7) POSTING PICTURES OF YOURSELF…. THAT YOU TOOK
Both guys and girls do this, but girls do it WAY more. And it is OH so annoying. Listen, if you catch sight of your reflection, see that you are looking good, and your first thought is “I should take a picture of myself and post it to Facebook so that everyone can tell me how hot I look,” you have got a lot of stuff to work out (and no, I’m not talking about going to the gym). Taking pictures of yourself with a kissy-face, from just the right angle, with just the right amount of cleavage showing…. It’s been done literally a billion times. It reeks of “tell me that I’m pretty,” and that is almost always a smell that makes you seem less beautiful. I understand wanting to have pictures of yourself where you look your best, but if you go through the photos of you and notice that a whole lot of them were taken by you, you might want to check your vanity.

If you read this and realize that you do one or more of the things on this list, here’s what you should do: Stop it. Stop it right now. You’re being annoying. I’m not the only one who thinks so. Please stop. Thank you for making Facebook more fun for everyone.

64 Responses to Seven Annoying Things People Do On Facebook

You left off people that constantly write “love letters” to their significant others on their wall. Example: “You are my sun and moon and shattered my world in 2 last night. My love for you knows no bounds.”. So yeah – its called a phone call, text or email, people. Posting it publicly on Facebook doesn’t make your love more deep / just makes us wonder why you need to prove it to everyone else.

The mysterious status that is a passive-aggressive ploy to get attention, oooh the shorter the better. “So tough right now”/”wishing things will change”/”hurting” BLECK. Oh and also, comments with false promises to pray for something. DUDE don’t lie about that or throw it out as a standard thing. Either you’re PRAYING FOR SOMEONE or you’re not; somehow typing “prayers!” or “prayers for your family” is now the new “have a nice day”. That just seems perilous.

Yeah, I have no idea how to handle the Facebook cry for help. I want to help, but I don’t want to just fan the flame of someone’s self pity. It’s the social networking equivalent of buying a beggar a sandwich instead of giving him money that he’s probably going to spend getting drunk….

“vaguebooking” – where someone says something completely attention-baiting and mysterious like “I can’t believe it. I am speechless.” And all her friends are all “whatssss up?” “xxoo!!!” “i hear u girl.” And I’m the moron who, through all my annoyance at this vagueness and horrible grammar, is secretly (and ashamedly) inquisitive as to what this person is referring…but all I get to satiate my curiosity is the person commenting back with “Chris, I’ll txt you.”

constantly sharing religious, patriotic, or funny pictures. occasionally i’ll laugh at that, but you are just turning facebook into 4chan, tumblr, or memebase, and i really mostly use facebook to keep in contact with people that have moved away

I’m guilty of a few of those…oops!! One of my facebook pet peeves is people who post a million pictures or YouTube videos all the time. It hogs my feed. Also people who post about being sick all the time. Now if you post once or twice EVER, no prob. But there are people who post about every headache and hangnail, and I’ve come really close to unfriending them cause I get tired of hearing it! Lastly, people who complain in general. Get off your butt and go do something to fix the problem (and you’re probably part of it)! Stop complaining about it on facebook! Ugh!

Excellent. Thank you for posting Chris. You are so good at zeroing in on the social ills of the world & are helping to make it a better place. (I am much more vigilant about cleaning up after my kids in a restaurant because of you. Just shy of asking to use the mop.) The unicorn tears made me laugh. I just learned from some people who were based in Japan that they actually massage cows there on a regular basis to make the meat more tender. I can’t help but feel sorry for the poor veal completely immobilized in pens for the same purpose here in the US, and how they could be living it up in Asia instead.

I think part of signing up for facebook should be reading this list! Thanks Chris for posting this. If I want to have a farm, I will move to the country and buy land. If I wanted to play games, I would call my friends to come over. Learn to post pictures in an album, not 20 individual pics. One or two is nice, 20 wears out my scroll key. Not that anyone will read this or care, but I do feel a bit better now 🙂

The young mother who posts every single “cute” response her children make. What makes it worse is when all her friends egg her on by saying, “Oh, your kids just crack me up,” “You’re kids are just so adorable,” blah blah blah…

I just got another cancer one today! “98% of my friends won’t repost this” made me google until I found your blog!! I can’t even count the number of times I have had to Private Message someone that they’ve posted a hoax and should remove it. Posting link to this blog….should I ask them to repost if they are my friends!!!! NO.

I love your blogs and love you even more! I agree with more than half of your top entries here. But some of the categories I disagree with. For example, If I happen to eat anything that has unicorn tears in it, on it, or near it, I just might post a pic (not that I have a cell phone equipped to do that). If, after working all day on baking/cooking something that I drove around to several stores, sometimes over several days, and it took an incredibly lot of effort to make, I just might have to take the effort to take a pic and download it from my camera, and upload it from my camera to share with the world, because yes, I am that proud of the work I did as if it was done by my own offspring. So, if a pic of food happens to pop up and I say I did it – you can bet that it was through a great deal of effort that the pic even happened. Finally, I agree on the one hand about the posting of mundane stuff (going to the gym, walking up the stairs, washing laundry, getting a cup of coffee) but I recognize that a) sometimes people just want to share their lives and b) that sometimes those things indeed require every bit of effort as leaving your house to do an 8 hour day. So, please forgive those folks for their annoyances.

“Bwahahah” There, THAT is my pet peeve. Now, I realize that it important to let people know when something is funny, made you laugh, etc. And I realize the limitations of a typed response. But it is the “bw–” in front of the “haha” that so very much grates me to the bone. I hate that “bw–” I hate the little picture it creates in my mind of the person forming that Bw– sound out of their pursed lips.

I off-ten (this is an audio – its all over TV) see & here grammatical errors (I wish I didn’t). Another favorite (besides those demonstrated here) are dangling participles (there everywhere – by everywhere I mean especially TV again), like you saying what annoys you (only Peggy Hill consistently gets this). Also different than has been annoying me since I found out its always different from, after saying “different than” literally for decades myself. Mostly I’m only annoyed if it’s on TV: especially news, documentaries, news format etc. or when fictional characters, who should know better, don’t. Everybody else pretty much gets a pass as do typos. Thanks for you’re list and to all the repliers. (Notice its, here, there, you saying, its, you’re? Any others I’m begging a pass).

Just had another one…..that in the past six months has been so uber-annoying….those things that take over your news feeds with “lets see how many likes” so and so can get! Really people? I guarantee 99% of that stuff is fake and that if you give so and so a like, they are not going to win a million dollars or get a trip to disneyland etc! On another note I have been off of facebook for only 6 days (because I had a bad problem of getting a little to distracted from social media, and not because I really wanted to be on there, just a bad habit that I noticed was getting out of hand), anyway they have sent me three emails saying you have 25 notifications, you are missing out on this, you need to log back on blah blah blah…..I say NO facebook you will not draw me back in, I need a break! Six days and counting……

There are people who over do it when it comes to posting BS on Facebook. I’ve got one relative who posts more than 50 photos of her kid on a weekly basis. Do people really need to know your 3 week old baby just had her first ever visit to Target? No, they don’t. And what about the religious tweets that never end? One of my friend’s really believes his constant (cryptic) Christian tweets are going to eradicate all “sin” because he’s not over a former girlfriend who humiliated him in a “Maury Povich” fashion. Then there’s a cousin of mine who has 10 posts daily on average which are all non-sense & full of vanity. Who cares about her selfies where she has to let the world know that she will never be “obese” ever again or that she only wants to date guys who make over 6 figures. She even posts photos detailing every aspect of her “glamorous” dates as if she is on a basic cable reality show. People over do it on Facebook & it makes one wish that an asteroid can land on them to end all this misery.

When people call the most everyday, mundane activities “AMAZING”. Ie; “Sofa, book, fire, and sipping the most AMAZING milk I have ever had. I am obsessed. This is the most amazing day ever. Next? Going for a walk around the block.”

I admit that I sometimes post pictures of food, but only if it’s something I put extra time and care into. I won’t post a pic of fried chicken or hamburgers but I will post pictures of a beautifully made cake.

Exactly! What is Facebook for then? Probably just to annoy those easliy annoyed. Lol! It is a social site. To keep up with old friends and long distant family members. Which can also be used to vent, and show our a$$. So we all should be mindful of others, and especially of ourselves. The world doesnt need to know every detail of ones life and everyday movement patterns. All types of PREDATORS are watching us all, just waiting for us to be unguarded by our egos leading us into danger.

I agree on some of the annoying things listed, but the info on healthier happier produce. Being mindfull of other beings is never annoying to me. I’d also like more info on where to get this healthier real untainted food. Sorry if I annoyed anyone for posting a comment on an obviously venting about annoying Facebook posts.

I am tired of the “need prayers”, “pray for me” and then it’s for something stupid like a hang nail. I always wish the best for my friends, but seriously knock it off. You’re life is no more worse than the next person. And stop posting “Prayers needed” and not tell us what that’s about. Your just needy and want some attention.